If you zoom out to the perspective of, say, a bird with bad eyesight flying a mile up in the sky, the most surprising thing about the Emmy Awards, back for a second time in 2024 thanks to the quirks of post-strike scheduling, might be that, in aggregate, they kind of got it right. The best show on television of the last season, Shōgun , got the most nominations (25), and the TV Academy also found the space to recognize a wide range of quality work: Ripley , Reservation Dogs , even Girls5eva . But zoom in any closer, and the outline devolves into chaos: The Emmys went hard on prestige-ish streaming shows, skipped over movie stars and broadcast hits, and seemed generally indifferent to a lot of work that had us most excited about the current state of television.
(Plus, they liked Unfrosted ? Which is a TV movie?) Given how many categories the Emmys try to cover and the generally fractured industry, all this is to be expected, but it doesn’t make it any less baffling. Here, Vulture’s TV critics did our best to make sense of the scatterplot, identifying where the Academy went right, where they whiffed it, and where their taste just got weird. —Jackson McHenry .
Vulture has , on occasion , expressed the opinion that Matt Berry can , and should , be in most things . The fact that it’s taken the Emmys this long to agree is shameful. At least they’ve finally come around! —Kathryn VanArendonk .
It’s great that Reservation Dogs finally got some of the Emmys nominations .
